Watts article

[pynchonoid]

I doubt that Pynchon has lost his empathy for poor
blacks -- certainly it was in evidence in Mason &
Dixon.  Now that he's an old man, presumably able to
afford good health care, I expect he understands,
albeit from a different perspective relative to his in
1966,  the relative comfort and distraction that money
can buy, compared, say, to poor blacks without health
insurance who can only see a doctor when they reach a
crisis by calling 911 and going to an emergency room
somewhere, then facing a hospital bill that may add up
to three or four times what an insured patient would
be responsible for (this has been in the US press
recently).

Money doesn't eliminate any of the woes of human
existence, but it can make many of them easier to bear
- that's a fact.  Being able to afford good doctors
and the latest medicines/technkiques and know you can
pay for it without bankrupting the family provides a
level of comfort that poor people don't enjoy.


> > <<"While the white culture is concerned with
> various
> > forms of systematized folly--the economy of the
> area
> > in fact depending on it--the black culture is
> stuck
> > pretty much with basic realities like disease,
> like
> > failure, violence and death, which the whites have
> > mostly chosen--and can afford--to ignore."
> 

Paul Mackin:
> Maybe Pynchon is thinking like a 30-year old. Which
> he more or less was.
> As he approaches 70 it might occur to him to write
> the sentence
> differently.

Yes, as an old man *if* he were writing such an
article today, no doubt he would phrase many things in
a different way.  But we're dealing with the article
Pynchon wrote back then, and the Watts and US
black/white politics of 1966, not 2004.

=====
http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"


	
		
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